Tag: experimental

Groundhog Day meets a less interesting Gregor Samsa, the “ghoulish, insectile” characters being observed more than incarnated by the narrator. It’s the somewhat hokey but interesting story of a newly divorced woman with too much time on her hand who decides to volunteer for Movin’ On Up, a philanthropic moving company whose name winks, we’re not sure why (irony man, irony!), at the theme song from The Jeffersons. The people for whom furniture is being moved in the story generally have not much further room to go down. The story is interesting because of the insights within those homes, the characterizations of the “clients.” Its hook is less interesting, because unconvincing, unconnected to anything other than a device, a decision to create that “loop” where Bev relives again and again the Saturday when she puts in her volunteer hours, with a college girl who reminds her of her half-estranged daughter. Strange things begin to happen, like the bed frame that disappears, the second futon that appears next to the first, the table a client wants she never knew was in the truck. Things–“flaws,” Lennon calls them–like that. Things that aren’t even explicated by the loop, which is explained toward the end of the story. “The only time Bev felt she had her shit together was every other Saturday.” Turns out the only time she doesn’t have her shit together is every other Saturday, which apparently becomes every day. She wants her boring life back. But “That’s what had been taken from her–the absolute pristine uniqueness of each boring moment of existence.” Her memory loops, then there’s “the acceptance of the superfluity even of memory itself.” Strained words, strained theme, worth the ride in the truck, but unsatisfying: the experiment doesn;t sparkle.